I love the richness of the color that flows from a piece of stained glass when the sunlight hits it just right. This is the best reason I can think of for creating these pieces.

My work uses three-dimensional glass that is cracked or broken and no longer usable as such, for instance vases, pitchers, or ornaments. These are woven into the work alongside the flat colored (“stained”) glass one buys at craft shops. Adding shells, pieces of wood and stones completes the effect of a collage.

Here I am, on a freezing winter day, digging through snow and ice to find glass treasures. A glass-blowing firm nearby had cleaned its attic of broken glass pieces, and a friend had called me to tell me the dumpsters were full.

As I was teaching a friend the art of stained glass, she counted seventeen steps involved in the making of a glass piece, including: designing, choosing the glass and other objects to be used, marking the pattern, cutting, grinding, foiling (using a thin strip of copper foil, sticky on one side in order to adhere to the sides of the glass), fluxing to rid the area of dirt, soldering (solder is an alloy of lead and tin which interacts with copper to create a ridge of metal between the pieces of glass), washing and finally, polishing. These steps are the bones of the work. As you can see, it takes a long time and a lot of elbow grease. The results are wonderful.